**4.5 Awareness and cost of installing biogas facility**

Findings show that one household plant could cost USD 550- 675 with wide standard deviation suggesting a high variation for the cost of installation depending on the expertise availability and the size of the biogas facility. The size for biogas plants ranged from 6- 12m3.

A comparison across wealth ranks shows a significant difference (Table 5). The *slightly welloff* respondents had significantly less installation cost compared to *less poor* (p<5%) and the

The source of energy varied from one category to another across the three wealth ranks. Nevertheless, fuelwood dominated energy sources in all the three categories, where over 77% of the respondents were using fuelwood for cooking (Table 4), followed by biogas, very few of the respondents were using charcoal. No-one was using electricity for

The respondents were asked whether they would like to have a biogas facility in their homes or not, and almost all (96%) said yes, they are willing to install biogas facilities.

Fuelwood 89.5 83.3 60.6 77.8 Biogas 15.9 18.6 30.3 21.6 Biogas and charcoal 2.7 6.1 16.7 8.5 Electricity/LPG 0 0 0 0

The sources of fuelwood in the district are communal forests, private forests, farms and timber residues. The distance to the fuelwood sources ranged from 1.1km for the less poor and slightly well-off households and 2.25 km for the 'poor' categories. The average distance for all respondents was 1.40km. The short distance for accessing fuelwood by the slightly well off and less poor is partly because a high proportion of them have private forests near their homes. Most people in the district use fuelwood from their own planted trees.

A high proportion of the communal forests have been severely degraded which makes fuelwood not easily available. Women spend 3-4 hours looking for fuelwood. This means that households with biogas facility were saving 3-4 hours wasted in collecting fuelwood. The saved time is used for other economic activities (e.g. farming and marketing) as well as leisure (e.g. resting and listening to the news and other entertainment). On the other hand, if the use of biogas for cooking will increase the demand for fuelwood in the district may decrease which is likely to benefit the poor because most of them do not have dairy cattle for

Findings show that one household plant could cost USD 550- 675 with wide standard deviation suggesting a high variation for the cost of installation depending on the expertise availability and the size of the biogas facility. The size for biogas plants ranged from 6-

A comparison across wealth ranks shows a significant difference (Table 5). The *slightly welloff* respondents had significantly less installation cost compared to *less poor* (p<5%) and the

Table 4. Wealth Categories and Sources of Energy for Cooking (%)

**The Poor Less Poor Slightly Well-off Average** 

**4.3 Sources of energy for cooking** 

cooking.

Source: Survey data 2006

**4.4 Sources of fuelwood** 

biogas plant installation.

12m3.

Communal land is very limited in the district.

**4.5 Awareness and cost of installing biogas facility** 

*poor* (p<2%) categories. However, there was no significant difference of cost of installation between the *less poor* and the *poor* respondents. A major explanation to this is that a high proportion of the *slightly well off* respondents benefited from the pilot project in 1996 when the biogas facilities were installed at half cost by the Danish volunteers. This was a strategy used to sensitise and raise awareness and demand for the biogas facilities. Unfortunately, many people from the *less poor* and the *poor* categories could not take up this opportunity because of many reasons, one of them being risk averse. They wanted to learn from others how it worked and what the advantages were to be. However, by the time they were convinced by the technology and started adopting it, the price had gone back to the market price levels. Another reason for not adopting it during the promotion period was that they had other more pressing issues than biogas, such as a need for cash to carter farming activities and paying for education and health services. Various studies have shown that poor people are always risk averse and therefore it takes time for them to adopt a new technology. Many of the studies about technology adoption conclude that the pace of adopting a new technology in developing countries has been slow among the poor.1 Feder et al., (1985) have identified factors such as aversion to risk and limited access to information as reasons that could partly explain why adoption is slow. Individual characteristics such as education, access to credit, the capacity to bear risk, availability of other inputs and access to information may play a big role in the adoption of the technology.


NS =not significant, \*\* Significant at p<5%, \*\*\* Significant at p<2%

Table 5. A comparison of cost (USD) of installation across wealth ranks
